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How to get over your quinoa guilt trip, kinda

We’ve poked fun in the past at people who think that high prices for quinoa are taking food out of the mouths of poor farmers in Bolivia and Peru, but here’s a confession.

We didn’t have actual objective evidence that this was not the case. Just a gut feeling, based on experience and knowing people who know quinoa farmers. Oh, and lots of research on other commodities by Nobel prize winner Angus Deaton.

Now we do have evidence, from real agricultural economists, which I’ve written about at length (and thanks for giving me the length) at NPR’s The Salt.

Your Quinoa Habit Really Did Help Peru’s Poor. But There’s Trouble Ahead.

Bottom line, from the researchers:

“The claim that rising quinoa prices were hurting those who had traditionally produced and consumed it [is] patently false.”

And that goes for nutrition too, as the article explains.

So what’s the trouble ahead? There are three, actually, two of which will be familiar to readers of this site.

First, the boom in export markets is focussed on very few of the 3000 or so extant varieties of quinoa, which hold the future to further adaptation of quinoa as environmental conditions change. Payments for Agrobiodiversity Conservation Services could help to solve that.

Secondly, the sustainability of quinoa growing in the high Andes is in doubt because more intensive practices are resulting in soil erosion and degradation. No easy solution, unless the farmers band together and implement some minimum sustainability standards. That might give them an edge in an increasingly competitive market, the basis for confronting perhaps the biggest threat …

Prices have already started to drop, and are already well down on their peak. That’s hardly surprising. High prices have sucked in global competitors. Farmers in South America are holding on to their stocks in the hope that prices will rise again, but few of the people I spoke to have any expectation that they will rise.

As Marc Bellemare, one of the agricultural economists, told me:

“If we’re going to rejoice when prices go up, maybe we should worry when prices go down.”

A quick, selective trawl in our archives produces:

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Global Food Policy Report the usual downer

IFPRI’s 2016 Global Food Policy Report: How We Feed the World is Unsustainable is out and it makes for sobering reading. The press release doesn’t pull any punches either.

Land area the size of Nicaragua is lost due to drought and desertification every year, putting 200 million small-scale farmers in Africa south of the Sahara at high risk of climate change

The Western diet is unsustainable—feeding just one Westerner for one year emits as much greenhouse gas as seven round trip drives from New York to Los Angeles

Thankfully, some solutions are also suggested:

The development of climate-ready crops, which can lead to more efficient water use and improve yields, are key to feeding a growing population and adapting and mitigating against climate change.

Though you’ll look in vain for a mention of genebanks as underpinning efforts to roll out what I believe should properly be called climate-smart crops. “Climate-ready” was supposed to have been quietly deep-sized some time back, I’m reliably informed, as being too reminiscent of the draeded “Roundup-ready.”

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Measuring the elements of sorghum

There’s a great photo on the cover of Plant Physiology this month.

A small cross section of the breadth of diversity found in sorghum panicles from more than 45,000 accessions maintained by the U.S. National Plant Germplasm System at Griffin, GA. Cover image credit: Nadia Shakoor, Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, Saint Louis, Missouri.
“A small cross section of the breadth of diversity found in sorghum panicles from more than 45,000 accessions maintained by the U.S. National Plant Germplasm System at Griffin, GA.” Cover image credit: Nadia Shakoor, Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, Saint Louis, Missouri.

The paper in question looks at the “ionome” of sorghum seeds. That’s a new one on me too. It’s the genes responsible for the accumulation of different elements in whatever tissue. The authors measured the levels of a whole suite of elements in the seeds of a carefully chosen set of very diverse, and equally carefully genotyped, sorghum accessions representing all races. By comparing phenotype with genoptype, they identified gene variants associated with high levels of zinc, manganese, nickel, calcium, and cadmium. Now breeders interested in biofortification know what to include in their crossing programs.

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Oil lamp at the end of the tunnel?

Not a short-term solution, clearly, but it might be worthwhile starting to screen the larger collections, surely.

That’s what we said almost a year ago when the bacterium Xylella started wreaking havoc in the olive groves of Puglia, the heel of Italy. Well, it’s not a large collections of olives that’s been screened, but there are glimmers of hope in the recent report of an ongoing study looking at the results of both artificial inoculation and natural infection. Here’s the guy in charge, Giuseppe Stancanelli, as quoted by the BBC:

“…some varieties have shown some tolerance. They grow in infected orchards but do not show strong symptoms, as seen in more susceptible varieties. They are still infected by the inoculation but this infection is much slower so it takes longer for the infection to spread, and the concentration of the bacterium in the plant is much lower. This shows the potential for different responses (to the pathogen) in different varieties.”

It’s early days yet, and only about 10 varieties were looked at, but Leccino, for example, sounds like it might be showing promise. That’s a very common and widespread cultivar, so olive cultivation in a large part of Italy may well survive ok should the disease spread. Well, until the next disease, that is.

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Fancy maths meets haystack

One of the authors, Michael Mackay, tells us about a new book that is sure to set pulses racing.

A question anyone involved in crop improvement — breeders, pre-breeders, genebank managers, genetic resources experts of all hues — has invariably asked is: where can I find some new genetic variation to overcome this nasty new problem that’s hammering productivity in my region? We all know there is an enormous reservoir of plant genetic resources held in ex situ or in situ around the globe. To use a cliché that’s been much used but never bettered in this context: it’s all too often like looking for a needle in a haystack. Sure, molecular biology is increasingly predicting, and occasionally even delivering, a more rapid pathway to identifying and using those elusive new genes or alleles. But are we making the best possible use of the information that’s out there already?

Enter Applied Mathematics and Omics to Assess Crop Genetic Resources for Climate Change Adaptive Traits. This book, just published by CRC Press, applies the latest statistical techniques to explore plant genetic resources data of all different kinds. The aim is to help researchers create manageable, trait-specific, sub-sets of germplasm. These should end up being best-bet candidates for evaluation and further research. Think of core collections, but skewed towards — enriched for — particular traits, rather than efficiently covering diversity overall. Think of a smaller haystack with a much better chance of containing that needle.

While the book proposes a general conceptual mathematical framework for exploring how different data can be used to estimate the likelihood of specific variation existing within a given accession, there is a particular focus on climate change. It includes discussion of how genetic resources can be used to mitigate and adapt to climate change, and how different plant traits are likely to become more important as the climate changes.

So, as genebanks accumulate information on their germplasm — making the haystack ever bigger — and plant breeders come up with ever better ways to use that elusive needle, this book identifies an opportunity to bring these two communities together in the cause of adaptation to climate change. The maths needed to facilitate a more effective ‘mining’ of novel genes and alleles from the world’s genebanks is certainly fancy. But this books puts it within the reach of anyone with a computer. Or a pitchfork.